Do you feel like there is too much stimulus in your life? Too many emails? Too many work requests? Too many todos? Too many websites? Have you ever declared inbox bankruptcy?
I have. Many people I know have. I am writing this blog to explain how I am breaking out of this cycle of Too Much.
A common solution to Too Much is GTD, or Getting Things Done®. Unfortunately it is a complex system that only works effectively when implemented fully. It takes a massive amount of effort to get started. Unless all of the little details are followed in perpetuity, you end up with a complete mess of Too Much. You are back where you started, but still hoping for its promises.
So what goes wrong? I think of GTD® as the Atkins™ of an over-stimulated lifestyle. You want to lose weight so you pick up a book that tells you what you can and can’t eat, how much, and when. It promises that if you follow the diet precisely, you too can lose 15 pounds in 2 weeks. You try it out, end up slipping, and give up.
If you are larger than you should be, it means that you consume more calories than you should be. Dieting does not address the mindset of consuming calories… it doesn’t tell you why you ended up consuming more calories than you should. It tells you how to force yourself to consume fewer calories.
GTD is a system that forces you to sort, organize, and process your stimulus. It gives you projects and contexts and lists, but not much understanding and insight. Like a diet, many people end up where they started, baffled at what went wrong because they were not given insight to the psychology that got them in trouble in the first place.
For the last 3 months I have been refining a system that has changed my life so profoundly that I wanted to talk about it in the hopes that it helps others too. What I call the Focus Method is not a diet, but more akin to a framework of understanding.
I am not going to be telling you which list-making method or task management method to use. In fact GTD works perfectly fine within the context of the Focus Method. The idea of the Focus Method is to guide you in creating a system that works for you by giving you the mental building blocks necessary to make sustainable life changes.